7 September 2020
In Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory, and the Future on India's Northern Threshold' (Rutgers University Press, 2020), Sara Smith asks how love and marriage are bound up with global and regional geopolitical processes that make territory. Focusing on Ladakh, a region located on India's Northern frontier, the book asks how territory is made every day in marriage and birth ceremonies, in the kitchen, in the rearing of babies, and in everyday experiences of childhood, youth and religious life.
Sara Smith is associate professor of geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a feminist political geographer interested in the relationship between territory, bodies, and the everyday. Her research seeks to understand how politics and geopolitics are constituted through intimate acts of love, friendship, and birth. She has researched these questions in India's Ladakh region in relation to marriage and family planning, and is now engaged in a project on marginalized Himalayan youth. She also pursues this agenda in the US and global context through research on futurity, racialization, and the anthropocene. She is a founding member of the FLOCK Feminist Geography Collective. She has recently authored a second book, Political Geography: a Critical Introduction, and her co-edited volume, Feminist Geography Unbound: Discomfort, Bodies, and Prefigured Futures, will be published in 2021. Website: http://sarasmith.web.unc.edu/
The Panel:
Katherine Brickell is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), UK. Her feminist-oriented research cross-cuts social, political, development, and legal geography, with a long standing focus on the domestic sphere as a precarious space of contemporary everyday life. In addition to her new monograph Home SOS, Katherine has published multiple co-edited collections which speak to her connected interests in home (un)making, displacement, and (im)mobilities. These include Translocal Geographies (2011 with Ayona Datta), Geographies of Forced Eviction (2017 with Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia and Alex Vasudevan), The Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia (2017 with Simon Springer), and The Handbook of Displacement (2020 with her departmental colleagues). She has (co)-written over 40 journal articles in geography, international development, women's studies, and anthropology. Twitter: @K_Brickell
Ather Zia, Ph.D., is a political anthropologist, poet, short fiction writer, and a columnist. She teaches at the University of Northern Colorado Greeley. Ather is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women's Activism in Kashmir (June 2019) and co-editor of Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak (Women Unlimited 2020), Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (Upenn 2018) and A Desolation called Peace (Harper Collins, May 2019). She has published a poetry collection "The Frame" (1999) and another collection is forthcoming. Ather's ethnographic poetry on Kashmir has won an award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. She is the founder-editor of Kashmir Lit and is the co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the Kashmir region. Find her on Twitter @aziakashmir and on Academia.
Majed Akhter is Lecturer of Environment and Society in the Department of Geography at King's College London. He was previously Assistant Professor of Geography at Indiana University in the US. He is interested in uneven development, geopolitics, environment, empire, and Marxism.
Organised by Dr Sneha Krishnan with support from the Political Worlds Research Cluster, School of Geography and the Environment.